After more than 4 years since it was first conceived, the ULTRADIAN study has reached the end of its recruitment period. There is still much to be done with hundreds of hormone profiles to be processed, reviewed and analysed.

We’ll keep you up to date here with developments including any media releases, publications and meetings. Watch this space!

Its been a while since the last blog post but in the meantime things have been very busy with the project. A 6 month project extension was granted by the EU funding body allowing recruitment to continue until early 2020.

As of today, over 200 healthy volunteers have been successfully sampled, along with almost 50 patients with Cushing’s, more than 30 with primary adrenal insufficiency (Addison’s) and almost 60 patients with primary hyperaldosteronism.

An enormous amount of data is being generated and this takes time to be analysed. At the moment we are working on the validation and data checks whilst developing classifier algorithms based on advanced mathematical and machine learning techniques. A demonstration of the discriminator algorithm for Cushing’s disease is being presented in poster form at the annual SfE BES Endocrinology meeting in Brighton. The poster will be made available here shortly afterwards.

It was a great couple of days with excellent presentations from both the invited speakers and ULTRADIAN researchers who presented a first glimpse of data from both healthy volunteers, and patients with Cushing’s, Addison’s and primary aldosteronism.

Focus over the next few months will be on completing recruitment of all healthy volunteers and patients. Data will be analysed using a variety of methods including a custom set of statistical, mathematical and machine learning techniques designed specifically for the project. Keep following this blog at @ultradian2020 on Twitter for more information!

The ULTRADIAN consortium is looking forward to hosting delegates at the upcoming “Biological rhythms in health and disease” conference. Hosted at the University of Bergen the meeting runs from 28-30 August 2019 and will feature a number of international speakers.

We recently attended the European Congress of Endocrinology in Lyon which was a great meeting in a lovely city. We had the opportunity to present a method poster describing how we are validating the ULTRADIAN interstitial fluid data against conventional plasma methods. The initial data is looking great – click the link below to view the poster and see for yourselves some example profiles of cortisol, cortisone and aldosterone from four of our healthy volunteers!

Thomas recently presented the bioRHYTHM Sampling around the clock study in poster form at BNA Festival of Neuroscience and won first prize in the Early Career Researcher Preregistration category – you can download and view the poster here!